This permission comes from NPCI, the payments regulator of India who earlier granted WhatsApp to test its payments service with upto 20 million users, and later 40 million people. Though the new cap is more than double of existing limit, WhatsApp is wishing for the unlimited bar considering its 500+ million Indian users.
Expansion of WhatsApp Pay in India
WhatsApp being the most widely used instant messenger in India, it started testing a payment service too from with the app a couple of years ago. Initially, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had given the platform to test this service only with upto 20 million users. As WhatsApp run out of that threshold last year, it requested more and was granted a double capacity in November 2021. Yet, it isn’t enough, as the platform is having over 500 million users in India. Thus, since it ran of that 40 million users threshold too, it requested NPCI to remove the cap altogether for more. But, NPCI has reportedly extended this cap upto 100 million now. This may entice WhatsApp, but the platform isn’t fully happy about being restricted still. Further, the platform is testing a number of business tools to let small businesses take orders and process them completely with payments within the app. So a restriction of such can severely hurt WhatsApp’s growth in the country. Other payment platforms like PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, etc are not having any userbase restrictions, thus having huge chunks of the market already, even though all use the same standard payment pipeline – UPI – which comes with partner banks processing the payments.
